Eleanor Crain
Eleanor "Nellie" Vance (née Crain) is a major character in The Haunting of Hill House. She was the youngest child and third daughter of Hugh and Olivia Crain, younger sister of Steven, Shirley, and Theodora Crain, and younger twin sister of Luke Crain. Profile Appearance As a child, Eleanor has long, pin-straight brown hair and a round face. She is often shown wearing dresses or skirts. As an adult, Eleanor has long brown hair with short, face-framing pieces usually kept parted in the middle. She doesn't wear much makeup and her style expresses a very natural, laid-back look. After her death and in subsequent apparitions, Eleanor is shown in various stages of decomposition. She appears to each of her siblings in the outfit they last saw her in. Personality As a child, Eleanor is very curious and considerably more cheery. She maintains a strong connection with her twin, Luke, both emotionally and psychically. As an adult, Eleanor is significantly more withdrawn due to her childhood trauma and sleep paralysis. She looks up to her older siblings and gets frustrated when they aren't there for her, as shown when she accuses Steven of not taking care of her like an older brother should. Story The first night after moving to the Hill House, she awakens to find the "Bent-Neck Lady" standing over her bed. The next night, Eleanor sleeps on the couch to avoid the Bent-Neck Lady. Her mother hands Eleanor a locket which she promises to give her when she is older. She falls asleep on the couch with her mother beside her. When her mother wakes up and finds that she's asleep, she leaves. When Eleanor wakes up later in the night, she finds the Bent-Neck Lady floating above her and that she's unable to move. In 1992"The Bent-Neck Lady", she leaves Hill House with her siblings and father. As an adult, she tells about her past to a sleep technologist, Arthur Vance, who explains that she suffers from sleep paralysis. He asks her for coffee and they begin dating. He proposes to her during a New Year's party, and they later move to Los Angeles together when he is offered a teaching position at UCLA. In Los Angeles, 8 months later, she sees the Bent-Neck Lady and she kills Arthur. His death is ruled an aneurysm. Nellie picks up Luke. He asks her to pick up heroin for him, saying he needs to "Get well" one last time before going to rehab. She agrees and buys some for him from a dealer off the street. He shoots up in his foot, and she sees the Bent-Neck Lady. She drops him off at the center. She goes through withdrawal along with her brother, via "the twin thing". A month later, she throws her pills out. She tells Theodora Crain about buying heroin for her brother, and Theo reprimands her. Eleanor asks that she touch spots in her room to see if she could sense anything about Arthur's death, which makes Theo mad. Eleanor calls Theo a freeloader and she leaves. She goes Steven and confronts him, accusing him of not being the protective older brother he should be to her. He pulls her aside and accuses her of not taking her pills. She confesses her problems to her therapist, who tells her she needs to confront her past. He suggests that she returns to Hill House as a means of remedying her unresolved childhood trauma, proposing that once she sees how harmless the house is she'll be able to let go of her issues. In Massachusetts, she returns to the house and envisions it as it was when she was a child. She reunites with visions of her mother, siblings, and husband, who she dances around the house with. Eventually the visions fade away and she is left with the ghost of her mother, who convinces her to put a noose around her neck and pushes her off the stairwell, resulting in Eleanor's death. Her neck broken by the fall, she realizes that she is the Bent-Neck Lady. Relationships Gallery Quotes * "Our moments fall around us like rain. Or... snow. Or confetti." * "... a house is like a body. And every house has eyes and bones and skin. A face. This room is like the heart of the house. No, not a heart, a stomach. It was your dance studio, Theo. It was my toy room. It was a reading room for mom. A game room for Steve. A family room for Shirley. A treehouse. But it was always the Red Room. It put on different faces so that'd we'd be still and quiet. While it digested." - in Silence Lay Steadily * "Forgiveness is warm. Like a tear on a cheek. Think of that and of me when you stand in the rain. I loved you completely. And you loved me the same. That's all. The rest is confetti." * "I learned a secret... there's no 'without.' I am not gone. I am scattered into so many pieces and sprinkled on your life like a new snow." * Trivia * Eleanor shares many characteristics with the character of the same name in the original novel. ** In the novel, Eleanor's full name is Eleanor Vance. Eleanor becomes Eleanor Vance when she marries Arthur. ** In the novel, Eleanor wears a bright red sweater at Theodora's suggestion in order to combat the dullness of Hill House. This red sweater becomes a trademark of her character. In the series, Eleanor is dressed in red at her funeral. ** In the novel, Eleanor becomes attached to Hill House to a disturbing degree and is forced to leave by the others, who are concerned about the state of her psyche. Eleanor chooses to drive her car into a tree, killing herself, rather than leave Hill House. In the series, Eleanor is killed by her mother in order to keep her with her in Hill House, and her death is looked at as a suicide. ** Both characters are 32 at the time of their deaths. ** In the novel, Eleanor has been forced to care for her aging mother for over a decade, the only member of her family to do so. In the series, Eleanor is the only one of her siblings who stays behind in Hill House with her parents. ** In the novel, Eleanor climbs a rickety library staircase in a fit of madness, presumably to commit suicide. In the series, Eleanor is hanged from a similar staircase. The book also describes one of the previous owners of Hill House who was driven to suicide. The characters speculate that she hanged herself from the staircase. ** Young Eleanor's "cup of stars" comes from a scene that book Eleanor witnesses in a restaurant. She sees a young girl at another table refusing to drink out of anything but her cup of stars, which her mother says they left at home. Eleanor admires the little girl for her stubbornness, and later lies to Theodora about having a cup of stars of her own when she was a girl. ** Both characters experience a descent into madness that culminates in their deaths: in the book, this is shown through Eleanor's withdrawal from the others in the house and communication with the spirits in the house, while in the series this is shown through Eleanor's refusal to take medication following the death of her husband. * The five Crain siblings represent the five stages of grief: Eleanor represents acceptance. * She is a Pisces. Category:Characters Category:Crain Family Category:Deceased Category:Female Characters